Consolidation of the State‘s information resources infrastructure

• Over almost 10 years, from 2015 to 2024, EUR 100 million has been spent to create a common public sector information technology (IT) infrastructure and ensure the centralised delivery of IT services.
• In 2024, the State Agency for Digital Solutions, which is supposed to provide centralised IT services to the public sector, did not provide 22% of the assessed IT services included in the service catalogue.
• The majority of public sector bodies did not make use of the centralised IT assurance and maintenance services offered (42% of the centrally provided IT services assessed were used by less than 15% of the selected bodies).
• The centralisation of IT services has not been assessed in terms of savings for the state budget, even though the aim of the project was to optimise costs.

The public audit Consolidation of the state's information resources infrastructure showed that the centralised provision of IT services needed by the public sector is inefficient. Not all IT services required by the public sector are provided centrally. The funding model for these services is not working and some institutions do not use centralised services at all. Finally, there is no assessment of whether the system, which over the last ten years has received EUR 100 million in investment from the state budget and EU funding, is saving the public money.

Centralisation of IT services in the public sector is an ambitious project, one of the objectives of which is to reduce the cost of acquiring and maintaining public sector IT services by their centralisation according to the needs of the institutions. However, the audit results show that there is no evidence to support the benefits of the centralisation of IT services.

"While we monitor the number of institutions using centralised IT services, this is not enough. There is a fundamental problem: there is no assessment of whether millions of euro of investment have created a system that will bring savings. Given that EU funding will end in 2026 and it is likely that the project will have to continue to be financed exclusively by the state budget, it is important for the responsible authorities to clearly assess now the current benefits, the real need for centralised IT services and the potential long-term impact of the investment. Reforms are not made just for the sake of reforms - we need to know the current and future benefits", says Auditor General Irena Segalovičienė.

The audit shows that the planned funding model for centralised IT services has not been implemented. The necessary appropriations should have been calculated on the basis of the planned volumes of services and the established fees, agreed with the service recipients and reallocated from their budgets to the IT service provider. However, this model was never implemented. Funding was planned without taking into account the actual volumes and prices of the services and the actual need for IT services remained uncalculated.

In 2024, the State Agency for Digital Solutions did not provide 4 of the 18 assessed IT services included in the service catalogue. These include maintenance of database management systems, printing services, maintenance of local area networks. The main reason for the non-provision of services is the lack of IT specialists in the Agency, which means that public sector bodies must continue to take care of IT services themselves, as they did before the consolidation process.

We assessed the extent to which the selected 52 institutions made use of centrally provided IT services. At the end of last year, less than 15% of these institutions were using 5 out of 12 centrally provided IT services. Service users often purchased IT services through public procurement, hired their own IT specialists or had existing contracts with other suppliers. The State Agency for Digital Solutions was not able to provide computer maintenance, software and workstation hardware services to all institutions, so the technical capacity created during the consolidation process was not fully exploited.

For the consolidation of the State's information resources infrastructure to deliver its intended benefits, the National Audit Office recommends that the Ministry of Economy and Innovation develop an efficient IT service model from planning and benefit assessment to financing. It should ensure that all the services included in the catalogue and needed by the public sector are provided. It is also important to ensure that institutions not only use these services, but also derive real benefits from them without incurring additional administrative burden.